


Cleverest Manka

by DWEmma



Category: Fairy Tales & Related Fandoms
Genre: Collection: Purimgifts Day 3, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-19
Updated: 2016-03-19
Packaged: 2018-05-27 17:44:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 769
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6293779
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DWEmma/pseuds/DWEmma
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If Manka is so clever, why couldn't so do better than the rabbi?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cleverest Manka

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Zdenka](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zdenka/gifts).



> I'm riffing off the Jewish variant of this, where the burgomaster is a rabbi. I couldn't find one on the internet. 
> 
> [Clever Manka Original Story](http://courses.wcupa.edu/johnson/tales/MANKA.HTM)

I’ve always been good at riddles. Riddles, puzzles, anything that one has to figure out using logic and a little bit of prior knowledge. But as a poor shepherd’s daughter, knowledge was hard to come by. We had no books to speak of. I knew the rabbi existed, but I am not boy who is allowed to be taught. So I must content myself to a life of caring for my father, and one day caring for my husband, and only sometimes using my mind to innovate things such as a better spinning wheel, or teaching the dogs better patterns to herd the flock. 

At first I was just interested in solving the puzzles. My father needed the heifer, and I’m just lucky that the riddle was so easy. Not so easy that my poor father could have figured it out on his own, but he was always smart enough to know what he did not know. And he was always smart enough to trust my answers, and my mother’s before me. My poor father is a kind man, but my mother was the one with the intelligence. 

The grain puzzle was just something I did to mock the rabbi for the silly and impossible task he set to me. It wasn’t even a puzzle. It was just a statement of what is impossible. He was beginning to wear on me. His puzzles were full of self importance, and showed that he valued his own cleverness over the actual tasks of the daily lives in the village. 

When he sent word with my father that he cared to marry me if I was as beautiful as I am clever, I had a choice to be made. I asked my father if the rabbi was as handsome as he was pretentious, but that question bore no fruit, as my father didn’t understand the question. 

But the books. Oh the books. If I was the rabbi’s wife, this would be my chance to learn everything in those books that I pressed my father to describe lining his office, and were scattered about his home. I looked around our bookless shack, and I looked at my modest appearance, and knew that my mind had stopped me from finding a husband so many times already. How many men didn’t want to court me because I could outthink them. 

This was my one chance to get out of this shack, this was my one chance to marry, and, most importantly, this was my chance at those books. 

“She must come neither by day nor by night, neither riding nor walking, neither dressed nor undressed.” 

So at dawn the next day, at the exact hour of neither day nor night, I came upon his house covered from head to toe (as modestly as the lack of cloth allowed) in a borrowed fishermen’s net, and with one leg on my favorite goat Moishe’s back, and one on the ground. I would marry those books if it was the last thing I did. 

And those books were worth everything I paid for them. The rabbi was not cruel, he did not force me to do anything I was not inclined to do myself, and he kept a housekeeper, so I knew I wasn’t being married for my ability to keep his large home. He didn’t offer me tutelage, but he didn’t deny me access to the books.  
It was a good life. It was a better life than any I had imagined for myself. 

But I couldn’t keep the bargain to not interfere. You see, the pretension of my husband made him overthink some of the cases brought forth to him. Take the case of my father that got me into this mess in the first place! He and the farmer had made a deal. There was a witness to this deal in me. A riddle is not the correct way to solve a dispute. Evidence is the best way to solve it. And a wagon cannot give birth to a foal. That is a biological fact. That I had to create anther silly puzzle to save that poor man from having his livestock taken away as my father almost had happen to me is a tragedy. 

And that I was cast to my father’s shack, married but with no husband, ruined for all other marriages and left with no books is a greater tragedy. 

Did I want to have the silly man back? 

Of course not. 

But I doubt he would have accepted “the library” as the one single thing, and I did like outsmarting him. 

[](http://www.mythsandtales.com/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderpictures/WCleverGirl.gif)


End file.
